Rootz's Blog

This book is a book that shows how absurd everything is. It starts with Billy Pilgrim, the main character. Billy is clearly not mentally stable. His narration is unreliable. His perspective of war is not to be trusted, is not rational. We’re seeing the war through his traumatized and confused point of view. But isn’t that the point? There is no rational perspective on war. It’s all absurd. War is human absurdism at its most extreme. It swallows up so many people, all at once. It takes away innocence and joy and life itself. And yet... it’s unavoidable, and anyone who thinks otherwise is being unrealistic. We’re supposed to accept the things we can’t change, and war is one of those things. The two ends of the spectrum in Slaughterhouse-Five are: war is absurd and evil and, on the other end, free will doesn’t exist. War, in other words, is unavoidable no matter how many people agree that killing other people should be avoided. The story explores both those ends in a dizzying traversal b...

One line review: Murderbot is an antisocial, depressed security robot who hates its job and wants nothing more than to watch TV shows, but unfortunately it is contractually obliged to save its humans. All Systems Red is funny, interesting and fun to read the whole way through. It’s a story about a security robot named Murderbot who hacked its own operating system and is now a free agent. It doesn’t tell anyone this and instead uses its newfound privileges to download thousands of hours of TV shows. It is rented out to a team of researchers who are exploring a new planet, and it pretty quickly turns out that the team is in danger. Unfortunately for Murderbot that means it has to stop watching TV shows and save its humans. The story itself is pretty bland, especially if you’re expecting an intricately plotted space opera, but that doesn’t detract much from the enjoyment because the point of the story is to get us invested in the plight of this robot who has freedom and now has to figure ...

If you want a one-line review, here it is: House of Suns is like We Are Legion (We Are Bob) ... just way more exciting. House of Suns is technically a hard sci-fi space opera. Technically. But that generic description doesn’t do this galactic murder mystery justice. Let’s start with the premise. Six million years before the story’s main plot, Abigail Gentian created 1000 clones (aka, “shatterlings”) of herself and sent them out across the galaxy. Every once in a while (say, a couple hundred thousand years) the shatterlings reunite and exchange memories from their adventures in space. But at the latest reunion, the Gentian Line is ambushed. Most of the shatterlings are killed. And that’s where House of Suns begins. The book follows two plot lines, one about the shatterlings and how they search out answers and revenge and one about Abigail Gentian and her story up until she cloned herself. Alastair Reynolds did an awesome job balancing action, interesting characters and a mysterious...